Three Bridges to cross
Why are more people than watch the average county stream subscribed to a Sussex club's YouTube channel?
It was just another player announcement on social media, you know the sort of thing: some guy has joined one county or another for a few games before he climbs wearily back into the plane and heads for that all-important three-match engagement with the Ghent Gladiators or San Francisco Phoenix, where one of his team-mates will almost certainly be Rashid Khan or James Vince.
The tweet above is an example of the form. Who is Matt Boyle, the Middlesex fans might be asking, and is he going to sort us out then? A quick look at his cricinfo profile seems promising: bloke’s got a hundred for New Zealand A and was the top scorer in last year’s Super Smash. Bowls a bit of leg spin too. But then, you know, so do lots of people…
However, if, like me, you are one of the 31,000+ subscribers to the Three Bridges CC YouTube channel or the 51k followers of their Instagram account, your first thought on hearing the above news was probably along the lines of, ‘bloody hell, not Susan… just when they’d assembled a top six that looks nailed on to finally, at last, win the Sussex Premier League…’
Because ‘Susan’ (as in Susan Boyle, geddit, yeah? Good one) has just returned to the Barker Meads (TBCC’s Field of Dreams, located in central Crawley) after a year away to complete a batting line up that has the subscribers salivating. Boyle joins stellar talents like Sussex tyro George ‘GT’ Thomas, a former England U19, and Luke Beaufort, the South African who served as overseas pro last season in Boyle’s absence but who, excitingly, has now qualified as a residential player and so makes up a fearsome top order. Boyle has three first-class hundreds, Beaufort one, while Thomas has a List A ton on his record. All are capable of some serious brutality on their day; Beaufort is a particular menace to the surrounding houses.
Even so, why are more people than watch some county streams tuning in to a weekly package of club cricket highlights, slickly edited but endearingly prone to overheard boundary conversations and missing footage, and not just tuning in but investing in the team and its players? Every match video attracts hundreds of comments, with the fans evidently deeply engaged in the brittle fortunes of the team’s stalwarts.
And it’s the stalwarts rather than the star players that make the channel what it is. Thomas or Boyle often open with James Russell, who contributes many a stoic half century to the cause while the ball flies out of the ground from the other end. Club captain Joe Walker is classic cricket archetype, a diminuitive wicketkeeper/batter who pulses with intent, running hard after his reverse sweeps and back cuts. A couple of years ago he had his front teeth removed in a freak accident behind the sticks, and played on. Mike Cowdrey joined three seasons ago, and was an instant hit, a deeply unorthodox batter who won game after game from the middle order, but then broke his leg playing football (I think) and is only now regaining his potency.
Then there are the bowlers. It’s sort of hard to judge the pace of the opening pair, Conor Golding and Arran Brown. Golding always opens from what I think of as the camera end, while Brown, a zippy left armer, takes the far end, from which the bowling always looks slightly slower than it probably is. The camera angle makes it hard to see how far back Walker stands or how much the ball is moving, but both his a pretty hard length and get some bounce.
I attach a (probably completely unfounded) air of sadness to Golding, who used to open the batting with James Russell, but has commenced a slow slide down the order to number seven, which doesn’t sit well with the natural elegance of his game. The Golding lofted drive, hit low to high, was a standout Bridges signature for a long time.
They had until this year a couple of high-class spinners in Ben Lucking, a left armer with a hint of the Phil Tufnells about him in the classic nature of his action and variation of pace and loop, and off-spinner Rowan Naude, but Lucking has departed after a season in which he was the league’s leading wicket taker.
George Cave, a footballing electrician, used to offer height and pace in the death overs, but he is another departure, while Ollie Blandford’s medium pace hasn’t been seen for a bit, either. Why’s that, then?
Here lies another part of the Bridges’ mystery and success. The match highlights have a voice-over, but nothing about the players’ lives away from cricket is revealed. Cave’s job as an electrician got the odd mention. Rahul Tangirala, who had a heartbreaking run of failure in his occasional appearances up until last season, when he began scoring runs, is playing university cricket. Walker and Cave spent the winter in Australia, where Cave has stayed on, but why or doing what, who knows?
As such, they remain a group of blokes who have the game in common. The rest is pure projection on behalf of the watchers. The growth of the channel must be a slightly strange feeling for the team – after all, who plays club cricket to have their innings filmed and then unpicked by a bunch of keyboard guys every Tuesday evening? But the matches are a source of genuine joy for the watchers, too. That much was obvious in the celebrations when Bridges first won and then defended the county T20 title.
Again, it’s hard to know if or how the profile or the income from the channel (they now offer merch like replica Three Bridges shirts) is changing the club. Their bete noir over the years has been Preston Nomads, who despite the name, are based just outside Brighton, a behemoth of a club founded in 1927 by a man called Spen Cama. Cama was a property developer who, when he died in 2002, left a reported million pound bequest to Nomads, as well as £7m to Sussex, where he had once served as president.
Nomads have won the Sussex Premier League a record ten times. Three Bridges never have. It would be a very modern fable if social media were to overcome old money and traditional power bases and deliver a change in the long-standing order.
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